Social Liberty: Relations

A person does not exist in a vacuum, and neither can a government. We are all connected, whether in our relationships to each other or by the ways we interact with society at large—our society, as well as others. Thus, a proper system of government must recognize these relationships if it is to fulfill its purpose.

There are three main types of relation that are of interest to a governing body: those between two people, those between two governments, and those between a person and the government. We will look at each of these in turn.

Interpersonal relations, those between two members of the same society, are the simplest to handle under the Doctrine of Social Liberty. As the Doctrine’s principles of good government define only those aspects necessary for a stable state, Social Liberty effectively takes no sides. It is not entirely silent on the issue; rather, interpersonal relations are considered private matters, only becoming of importance to the government if and when natural or granted rights become an issue.

One case where this can happen is in contracts. Under most circumstances, Social Liberty considers a contract willingly entered and in good faith negotiated to be entirely outside the scope of government interference. A citizen may waive some of his rights to another, and it is of no consequence to the state. However, a contract may not be designed to break laws, so the government can be asked to intervene to determine if an agreement is unlawful. Similarly, contracts of adhesion—where one party is essentially forced into unfair terms, with no opportunity for negotiation—do become matters for a Social Liberty government, as they are an attack on the founding principles of the state, namely, the Principle of Purpose: onerous contracts affect the liberties and well-being of those parties bound by them.

Other obvious instances where government interference in interpersonal relations is acceptable to the Doctrine include cases of abusive behavior—whether to children or adults—injury through negligence, and most abuses of authority. In general, you may sign away your rights, but you may not take those of another.

International relations are at the other extreme. Here, as a government represents its populace, it has near total control over negotiations and agreements. Within the confines of the Principles, a state may agree on behalf of its people to any number of treaties, trade deals, international conventions, and offers or requests for aid. The populace decides whether these measures are appropriate through the mechanisms of representation, and it should be understood (via the Principle of Evolution) that these international agreements are always subject to renegotiation, should they no longer serve their stated purpose.

It is far easier to enumerate those international actions a Social Liberty government cannot take. It cannot, for example, declare a war for the sole purpose of obtaining land or resources. Nor can it impose sanctions on other nations or regions based on their race, religion, or even their own system of government. And it cannot work to overthrow regimes, as there is no possible explanation for such an act that does not conflict with the Principle of Necessity.

Finally, we must look at the interactions between a person and the government. These are subject to the Principles as well as the Rights, Laws, and Responsibilities of the nation-state. In fact, such interactions are entirely governed by them. Thus, there is little to be said about them here. A government must treat its citizens in accordance with its defining Principles and its code of Laws, while citizens must follow those Laws and uphold their own Responsibilities. Anything else is a violation of the social contract between governed and governing.

However, there are always corner cases, so-called gray areas. It is up to a specific state to clearly delineate these outliers. The Doctrine itself must remain silent on them, as they are often highly situational. For example, what are the intrinsic factors of the Principle of Equality? One can imagine a world in which science has provided the ability to alter skin color at will. Here, “race”, in the sense of color, is no longer an intrinsic factor. Therefore, it does not qualify for the Principle of Equality. Potentially, the same could be true of many other factors we would consider intrinsic, such as sex or other genetic indicators.

It is by relating to others that we experience more of the world. Thus, a government must respect those relations. It must understand them. Sometimes, it must make its own. The Doctrine of Social Liberty recognizes these necessities. Its Principles confine and constrain the government’s role in these relationships, defining that role as the minimum needed to function while upholding the rights of all.

Happy birthday to me

You may have noticed there’s something new over there on the sidebar: a link to Patreon. Yep, I finally did it. Now, if you want, you can support my writing on a monthly basis, instead of the “whenever I put something out for sale” schedule I’ve been doing. And I hope you will.

I’m still working out the kinks, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

  • $1/month: This gets you basically anything I’ve put up for sale, like Before I Wake or any future novels. On top of that, I’ll throw in the occasional short story. Oh, and everything will always be DRM-free, so you don’t have to worry about that.

  • $3/month: Here’s where the real fun starts. For this much, you get not only my novel-length works, but also the short stories and novellas I’m not quite ready to put on, say, Kindle Direct. Even with those that I do end up selling, you’ll get them much earlier.

  • $10/month: This is quite a bit of money, and I doubt I’m as valuable as, for example, your Netflix subscription. But if you’re willing, I’ll definitely count you as one of my supporters. Literally. I’ll put you in the credits. And if that’s not enough, I plan on doing stories chosen by you. Starting at this level, you’ll get a full vote on those.

  • $30/month: The big one. While I could certainly add tiers higher than this, this is the limit both of what I feel comfortable asking (actually, that’s closer to $3 than $30) and of what I can legitimately do. If you’re giving me this much money, then you deserve a special reward. Therefore, anybody who contributes at this highest level will get 3 votes on my “supporter” stories. And they’ll get to appear in one of my stories. You know, a cameo. (If I’m feeling particularly generous, I’ll write some gruesome way for you to die or something. I don’t know.)

Now, you can absolutely put up more than $30 a month, but you don’t get any extra bonuses besides that warm, fuzzy feeling of helping somebody out. But even if you can’t quite afford that, every little bit helps. Every dollar you pledge is one that I didn’t have before. And I have to thank you for that.

(Note: Last year, I think I posted at 5:38 PM. If so, then I screwed up. I was actually born at 5:48, which unfortunately doesn’t have the same electoral significance. Oh, well.)

Let’s make a language, part 20a: Animals (Intro)

The fauna to plants’ flora, animals are those living beings that move. That’s not exactly a scientific definition, but it suffices for linguistic purposes. Plants just sit there, except when their leaves are falling or their seeds are blowing through the air. Animals, by contrast, are mobile. They walk or fly or slither or swim. They hunt, and they eat. From the perspective of language, they’re more like us.

Just as languages will have words describing plants, they will have a large portion of their vocabulary devoted to talking about animals. Think about how many names of animals you know. More than likely, you can probably recall a hundred or more. (Ubuntu managed to pick one for every letter of the alphabet, although they had to resort to a few obscure ones, like “eft” and “quetzal”.) Add to that the number of terms for animals’ body parts, their young, their meat, and you’ve got a laundry list of language.

The words a given tongue will have for animals can be roughly divided based on a familiar rule: those animals that are known to a language’s culture for a long time are more likely to have native names. Hence, English has dogs and cats natively, but it has to borrow raccoons and koi. “Foreign” animals get foreign or descriptive names, octopus being an example of the latter. And the more obscure ones often have compound names…when they didn’t have to settle for scientific ones. (Interestingly, this is one way linguistic historians can track the movement of a speech group. If they borrowed a name for a “local” animal, then they might not have always been in a place to get to know it.)

Domesticated animals

Those animals that have been domesticated will have the biggest chunk of vocabulary dedicated to them. Not only are there the general terms for an instance of the kind (dog, horse, etc.), but these are more likely to have gender differences even if the language doesn’t normally distinguish gender. In English, for example, we have pairs like horse/mare or bull/cow, where one of the gender-specific words is also the generic, and we also see three-way distinctions such as the generic chicken, male rooster (or cock), and female hen.

Domestic animals can also earn special words for their young. Sometimes, these are derived from the “adult” word: chick, kitten. Others are unrelated: puppy, pony. Note that these are not the same as diminutives. Those refer to smaller animals, not necessarily younger ones.

Languages may also give this type of animal a whole associated vocabulary. Breeding is a popular topic, as seen from words like thoroughbred or mutt. Purpose, for working animals, is often denoted by compounding—lapdog, workhorse—but separate terms can arise, e.g., an ox is merely a specialized kind of cattle.

These animals are also more likely to provide us with a number of metaphorical and analogous words or phrases. We can speak of someone being hounded after, then being cowed into submission. A coward is a chicken, while someone feigning death is playing possum. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as the saying goes—a rare bit of gender equality. The list goes on.

Wild animals

Those common yet untamed animals will be referred to by a different sort of terminology, but most of it will remain “native”, rather than borrowed. It’s still possible to have gender differences, but it’s more likely that the non-default sex will have a derived name: lion, lioness. Young may have dedicated words, but they probably won’t be specific to a single kind of animal. Bears and tigers both have cubs.

The rest of the vocabulary will be affected to the same, lesser, degree by wild animals. Some of the important ones get immortalized in metaphor (snake in the grass) or even slang (bear, as referring to a specific type of gay man). But they won’t be all that common.

Exotic animals

Even rarer are those animals which don’t really exist in the “natural” sphere of a language’s influence. For English, this includes anything out of the Americas, Africa, or Australia, along with quite a bit of Asia. These animals are much more likely to be called by borrowed names. Indigenous peoples gave us our words for a great many animals. As an American, I can point to raccoons, opossums, and moose, among others. An Australian would instead hold up the kangaroo, dingo, and wallaby, while South Americans and Africans can provide their own examples.

Another option (and this is, in fact, where many of the indigenous names come from) is onomatopoeia. Animals can earn names that resemble the sounds they make. It’d be like us calling a cow moo. Although that sounds strange, plenty of languages do just that.

Finally, a more scientifically advanced culture may try to give a name to everything. Our scientific names (or binomial names) serve to identify every living thing on Earth, including animals, plants, bacteria, and more. They are rigorously rational and mechanical, however, and every one of them is invented. (Not only that, but they’re then shoehorned into an entirely different language, Latin.) For a future language, possibly one needing to name alien species, this is an attractive option.

Mythological creatures

Not every animal named in a language actually exists. Some come from mythology and imagination. Greek myth, thanks to its influence on classical education throughout the West, has given us quite a few “creature” names: phoenix, basilisk, Pegasus, centaur. Dragons are common to many parts of the world, as are giants, which may be important enough to earn their own word. Elves, fairies, and anything else you can think of will fit in this section, as well.

Creatures of myth and legend can be named in any way. Many are derived terms (basilisk coming from the Ancient Greek word for “king”, wyvern from a dialectal form cognate to “viper”, werewolf combining “wolf” with an old term for “man”), but some are original. Sometimes, an entire “race” of creatures can be named after their mythological founder, as is the case with Pegasus.

Animal nature

Animals are very important to our lives. One of the ways we show that is by including them in such a large part of our language. Even the most generic terms have use, as we can speak of animal magnetism or the reptilian part of a brain. More specifically, an animal that we see every day, that we interact with regularly, will insinuate itself into our speech. We’ll compare things to it, judge others by it. And when we meet a new creature, we’ll give it a new name. Sometimes, we’ll relate it to what we already know. Other times, we’ll simply call it as the locals do. And that’s fine, too.

Still to come

After the usual Isian and Ardari posts, we’ll get back to more human concerns by looking at ways to work. Along the way, we’ll (finally!) pick up some more verbs, something we’ve been sorely lacking. I hope you’re having fun, because even though this is the 20th entry in the series, we’re not even close to done.

Software internals: floating-point

Integers are the basis for all computer calculation, but they’re not the only kind of numbers out there. Floating-point numbers are just as important when interfacing with the real world. They represent decimals, fractional quantities, anything other than simple whole numbers. But too many programmers use them without understanding them, and that tends to go horribly wrong.

First off, let’s get one link out of the way. What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic describes everything you need in more technical and precise terms than I ever could. It’s a good read, and it’s important stuff, so check it out if you want the gritty details.

Now, we’re fortunate to live in today’s world, because floating-point numbers are essentially standardized. IEEE 754 (along with some later revisions) defines a common floating-point format that’s used pretty much everywhere in modern tech. If it isn’t, then it’s still assumed to be. So we’ll base our discussion on that.

The theory

Floating-point numbers work a bit like scientific notation. In decimal, you can write something like 1.42 × 10^4^, and that’s understood to be the same as 14,200. But computers work in binary, so we need a binary form of scientific notation. In this case, for example, we can write 14,200 in binary as 11011101111000, or 1.1011101111 × 2^13^.

From there, we can create a way of packing this notation into a sequence of bits: floating-point numbers. What do we need? Well, each number can be either positive or negative, so we need some way of showing that. And we’ll have to store both the exponent (e.g, 13) and the mantissa (binary 1.101110111). The base (2, for binary) can be implied, as we know we’re working with binary. Put those three parts—mantissa, exponent, and sign—together, and you’ve got floating-point.

The practice

But it’s not as easy as that, and that’s why we have standards. First, how many bits are you going to use? Too few, and you don’t have much range. Too many, and you waste space on inconsequential fractions. However, sometimes you need those less-significant bits, so you might want to have options. Luckily, the standard gives us two main options: 32 and 64 bits. Unluckily, a lot of programming languages (like JavaScript) limit you to the latter. Some, like C, give you the choice between float and double (the latter meaning “double precision”, because that’s about what you get with more bits), but high-level programmers often don’t have that luxury. Since the “big” high-level languages tend to use 64-bit floating-point, then, we’ll look at it first.

Given our 64 bits, we need to divide them up among our three parts. The sign bit obviously only needs one, so that’s that. Of the remaining 63, the standard devotes 53 to the mantissa and 11 to the exponent. That lets us store binary exponents over 1000 and the equivalent of about 15 digits of precision. Add in a few special tricks (like denormalized numbers), and the total range runs from 10^-308^ to 10^308^. Huge. (32-bit still nets you 7 digits in a range of 10^±38^, which isn’t too shabby.)

Now, those of you better at math may have noticed a calculation error above. That’s intentional. The way IEEE 754 works, it saves a bit by a clever ruse. In decimal scientific notation, as you may know, the number to the left of the decimal point can’t be zero, and it has to be less than 10. (Otherwise, you could shift the point left or right one more spot.) The same is true for binary, but with a binary 10, i.e, 2. But there’s only one binary number that fills that role: 1. With a few exceptions, you’re always going to have the 1, so why bother putting it in?

The problem with this “implied” 1 comes when you have the one number that has no 1 anywhere in it. That, of course, is 0. But it’s okay, because the standard simply makes 0, well, 0. Exponent zero, mantissa zero. Sign…well, that’s different. Standard floating-point representation has two zeroes: negative and positive. They’re treated as equal essentially everywhere, but they do differ in that one sign bit.

The IEEE standard also does an odd thing with its exponents. Except for the case of a literal 0, every exponent is biased. For 64-bit numbers, the number 1023 is added to the exponent, so a number like 2.5 (binary 10.1 or 1.01 × 2^1^) would be stored as if it were 1.01 × 2^1024^. Why? Because it makes sorting and comparison easier, or so they claim.

In the rare event that you go outside the range, you get to infinity. Like zero, we’ve got two forms of that, one for either sign, but they’re considered nearly the same.

And then there’s NaN. This is a special value used mainly to make programmers scream, but it also represents invalid results like dividing by zero or taking the square root of a negative number. NaN is special in that it’s a whole class of values (anything with all bits in the exponent field set to 1), but they’re completely different. NaN equals nothing, not even another NaN. It’s a null value and an error code at the same time, which is where things inevitably go wrong.

Care and feeding

NaN, though, is only one of the pitfalls of using floating-point. You also have to watch out for infinities, since they don’t play nice with finite numbers. Also, unless you have a really good reason for doing so (such as being John Carmack), you probably don’t want to mess with the bits themselves.

More important than knowing how to use floating-point numbers is when to use them. Or, rather, when not to. They do give you precision, often more than you need, but sometimes that’s not enough. Take the classic example of 1/3. In decimal, it’s an endless string of 3s. Binary changes that to a repeating pattern of 01, but the principle is the same. No matter how many digits or bits you’ve got, you’re never getting to the end. So the simple code 1.0 / 3.0 will never give you exactly 1/3. It can’t. The same goes for any other fraction whose denominator isn’t exactly a power of two. So, if you need exact representation of an arbitrary rational number, floating-point won’t help you.

For 1/100, it’s no different, and that’s why floating-point isn’t a great idea for money, either. Sure, for most simple purposes, it’s close enough, but those tiny errors do add up, especially when multiplication and division get involved. If you’re serious about your money, you won’t be storing how much you have in a floating-point number. Instead, you’ll likely want a decimal type, something a lot of business-oriented languages offer.

In the general case, however, floating-point is the solution. You just have to know its limitations.

Social Liberty: Rights and Responsibilities

The following are some of the founding rights of Social Liberty, as set out by the Principle of Initial Conditions. Each is then given its own commentary regarding how it fits within the system and why it was chosen.

Right of Free Expression — All persons have the right to express in spoken, written, and published forms any truthful or opinionated statement not intended to cause direct harm to another, whether alone or with others.

This is a restatement of part of the First Amendment, covering freedom of speech and the press together with the right to assemble. “Direct” harm is intentional: words have no power to physically hurt, but they can incite others to do so.

Right of Faith — All persons have the right to practice their own faith without interference from a citizen or government.

This one covers the Establishment Clause part of the First, as well as most other “freedom of religion” aspects. Note that something like a cult where members are poisoned, or the rape and slavery practiced by ISIS, are not protected under the Right of Faith; allowing those violates the higher Principle of Purpose, as a government must endeavor to keep its citizenry safe.

Right of Arms — All persons are permitted to own and bear personal arms intended for their own defense.

Your basic Second Amendment, but written more clearly. Also, there’s no room for a comma splice to change the meaning.

Right to Privacy — No agent of government may observe or search a person without a warrant obtained under reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, nor may an agent of government seize any of a person’s property unless that person has been charged with a crime.

Definition of Agent of Government — An agent of government, in regards to the Right to Privacy, is any person working directly subordinate to the state for purposes of defense, security, or law enforcement, or granted such status by another agent.

Here’s your Fourth, with the usual search-and-seizure stuff. “Observe” includes wiretaps, too, and you can see how it also covers the Third Amendment.

Right to Criminal Trial — A person charged with committing a crime must be allowed a fair trial, by a jury if that person so chooses, without undue delay, and the person must be given sufficient opportunity to present a defense of the charges.

Standard Sixth with this one, plus a requirement that the court allow a proper defense. No “freeze their assets so they can’t pay a lawyer” trickery here.

Right to Civil Trial — When two people are in dispute regarding a debt or infringement of rights, either party may request a judicial hearing or jury trial to settle that dispute.

This one’s the Seventh Amendment, often forgotten in our time of binding arbitration. Arbitration, as a private matter, is not part of Social Liberty. Only the use of it in place of a court is within the government’s purview.

Right to Petition — Any person may petition the government, through a trial by an impartial arbiter or jury of citizens, to redress a perceived violation of that person’s rights.

This one’s actually part of the First Amendment (“petition the government for a redress of grievances”), but it’s put here so it falls with the other “trial” Rights. Effectively, it is the right to sue the government if it is breaching your rights. As with the others, the wronged party has the right to choose a hearing or jury trial.

Right to Freedom of Person — No person may be forced by another to work without proper compensation.

Definition of Proper Compensation — Proper compensation, in regards to the Right to Freedom of Person, consists of monetary pay, tangible benefits, and status or rank as befits the work performed.

Slavery, technically, is forbidden by the Principle of Purpose, but this restates it as a Right, roughly equivalent to the Thirteenth Amendment. The definition also subtly invokes minimum wage, “wage gaps” (via the Principle of Equality), and things like insurance benefits.

Right to Vote — All able citizens are permitted to vote on matters of government representation and public petitions, and no action may be taken by another to deprive a person of this right.

Responsibility Of Voting — An able citizen must vote in representative elections or on balloted matters of local or state import, unless this would cause undue hardship or duress.

Definition of Able Citizen — Regarding the Right to Vote and the Responsibility of Voting, an able citizen is a person above the age of majority who is of sound mind.

Voting rights are mentioned in quite a few amendments to the US Constitution: the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th are all concerned with opening up the vote to more people. Social Liberty dispenses with all that; every adult who is capable of doing so not only can vote, but must vote. In other words, it’s more like Australia, where everyone is both automatically registered and required to vote in elections. Also, ballot measures are enshrined here as an important part of the political process.

These are not the only rights granted by the Doctrine of Social Liberty, but they are some of the most notable. For the most part, they flow logically from the Principle of Initial Conditions, sometimes affected by the other Principles. And they are rights that, when stated in this form, should be universally agreed upon. Nothing in them prefers or promotes a specific political agenda, except the general notion of greater liberty for all.

Building aliens: physiology

We’re a few parts into this series now, and we still haven’t discussed what aliens look like! It’s time to remedy that. Here, we’ll look at alien physiology and body structure. From cells to organs to “the surface”, we’ll see what goes into making something seem alien, yet plausible.

On the inside

A lot of the earlier parts go into making aliens. After all, they are organisms evolved in and adapted to a specific environment. That’s going to affect their nature. If you’ve ever watched some of those David Attenborough nature shows, then you probably know this already. Fish that live deep in the ocean tend to be flatter. Desert plants have ways of capturing and storing water. Humans lost most of their body hair, while gaining the larger brains that enable us to write (and read) posts like this.

Physiology, of course, is about more than just appearances. It’s also about how the body works. And that’s a complicated matter. We, as humans, have a bunch of organs, almost all of which have to function just right. Some have redundancy—we can live without one lung, or one kidney. Others, like the heart, brain, or liver, are alone; notice how many of those have extra protection. And then there are a few that don’t really seem to be of any use. We can get by just fine without tonsils, for instance. I do. And the appendix literally does more harm than good, having the sole purpose of occasionally becoming inflamed or worse.

Other complex organisms have organs, too. Some of them have different sets of them. Ruminants (like cows) have multiple stomachs, for example. Birds, being egg-layers, have extra equipment for that purpose. And so on.

But the systems that organs control are fairly general. Those things an organism must do will often have dedicated systems. In addition, there will be a few other “support” systems to make these work. So let’s look at what’s biologically required of us, and we’ll see how that translates to aliens.

Intake

Everything living requires some sort of energy input. For us, that comes in the form of food, water, and air. We need all of these to run the chemical reactions that create life as we know it. So does everything else. Thus, we’ve got a mouth that’s front and center, our universal access point for input. So do most other animals.

Plants are a little different. They don’t need to “eat” in the same way we do. Much of their energy input comes from photosynthesis, a different kind of reaction using sunlight as the power source. But they still require water, and they still need air. (And that includes some oxygen, not just CO2.) So you won’t see plants with mouths, except in the case of carnivorous plants—and most of those instead use a trapping mechanism.

As for aliens, the situation depends on evolutionary history and environment. If your aliens eat and drink, then they’ll have some equivalent to a mouth for that purpose. After the mouth, there’s the digestive tract, where nutrients are extracted from the food. While it won’t necessarily be human-like, it has the same function as ours, so it might be somewhat similar to something on Earth.

Output

Not everything is digestible. The leftovers are mostly useless to us, so there’s no point keeping them around. Thus, our bodies get rid of them, in the form of waste. Animal waste, including human, does have its uses (e.g., as fertilizer or fuel), but it’s mostly just that: waste. Because we don’t want it inside us, we’ve got a system to get it out.

For solid waste, of course, we’ve got a dedicated part of the body. Liquid waste (urine) gets mixed in with other parts, however, in a bit of evolutionary parsimony: we’re not going to use both functions at the same time, so it wouldn’t hurt to let one organ do two unrelated jobs. Other organisms, including aliens, might not do this, which is okay unless you’re really into that sort of thing. Excretory systems, in an advanced, sapient species, may develop cultural taboos, too, but that’s a subject for a later post.

Reproductive

The sole reason to live, from an evolutionary perspective, is to reproduce. At its core, that’s why sex is enjoyable—if we didn’t like it, we wouldn’t do it as much. And so it stands to reason that reproductive organs have a lot of cultural significance attached to them. But they’re also interesting from a biological standpoint.

As stated above, human reproduction overlaps with excretion, but that’s not necessarily a given in aliens. What is, though, is that they’ll reproduce. And it’s likely to be sexual reproduction, not the asexual style used by, say, bacteria. Sexual reproduction requires at least two parents (possibly more, as in the recent news about three-parent IVF), but that gives it the benefit of better genetic mixing. By taking genes from two sources, organisms have a better chance to resist a bad mutation. That’s not the only upside, but it’s one of the biggest.

The internal part of reproduction has its own intricacies. For mammals and many other animals, only one parent actually contains the reproductive machinery. Males can impregnate, but females give birth. It doesn’t have to be this way. Other species on our planet show hermaphroditism (some or all members have both sets of reproductive organs). Another possibility, though harder to make work, is more than two sexes. And then there are odder methods. An alien race could be all females, but some can temporarily express “maleness”. Or the males could carry eggs for a period of time.

Just as important as the organs at work is the way reproduction happens. Are babies born live, as in mammals? Do they hatch from eggs? How many are born at once? For this one, humans are mostly one-at-a-time, but multiple births aren’t exactly rare. Other species, especially those that lay eggs, have larger litters or clutches.

(Oh, and before you ask, it’s astronomically unlikely that we’d be compatible enough with an alien race to reproduce with them. Half-human hybrids, though great for storytelling purposes, are not the hardest of science.)

Senses

Organisms must experience the world around them, if for no other reason than to obtain food and find a mate. For that purpose, we have our senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing. Each one has a use, and each has developed over the ages.

Evolution determines which senses are present. The ecological niche of a species is a good indicator of what its sensory capabilities will be. Cave-dwellers often have poor eyesight—if they even have eyes at all. Carnivores might have heightened senses of smell to track prey, while scavengers may have weakened taste. Here, the best guideline is reasoning: think of what your aliens would need where they live—or, if they’re highly advanced, where they originally came from.

Exotic senses can exist, within reason. Echolocation is popular in Earth animals, especially those without a good sense of sight. An herbivore living in a dangerous area might develop better peripheral vision. Hearing in the infrasonic and ultrasonic is perfectly valid for aliens, as are infrared and ultraviolet sight. Some birds seem to have sensitivity to magnetic fields. About the only things that aren’t possible are those that, well, aren’t possible. Like psionics, or seeing X-rays.

Each sense is going to have at least one organ behind it. We’ve got eyes, ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. Others are possible, though. Whiskers, antennae, suckers, tails, and anything you can think of can go towards the sensory system, if you can give it a good reason for being there.

Body plans

The outside of the body—what a species looks like—is probably more important from a storytelling point of view.

We humans have a distinct body symmetry. Left side looks like right, and we’ve got a lot of double organs, like lungs, eyes, and ears. And most animals are the same way. There might be small differences, such as fish with both eyes on the same side of the head, but those tend to be exceptions that prove the rule. This bilateral symmetry isn’t the only option. Starfish, for example, show a radial body plan: arms sticking out from around a center. Many plants aren’t really symmetrical at all, instead opting for a kind of “fractal” body plan.

Another thing we, as animals, have is segmentation. You might recall from science classes long ago that our bodies are divided into three segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. The head is where the brain lies, while the other two make up the body proper. And each of those segments has a pair of limbs (it’s a pair because of that bilateral symmetry). If we had another segment, say between the thorax and abdomen, we might have a second pair of legs (like a centaur) or arms (like Goro from Mortal Kombat). And if we kept growing new end segments as we aged, we’d be literal human centipedes!

Interesting minutiae

That covers the most important parts of an organism’s physical body. There are plenty of other systems (circulatory, nervous, endocrine, etc.) that will likely have counterparts in an alien race, but they follow much the same logic as those mentioned above.

Some other bodily things to think about include:

  • Defenses: Some organisms have evolved methods to defend against predators…or each other. Some plants are poisonous. Many snakes are venomous. Cacti and porcupines are both covered in sharp and pointy armor, while turtles and snails opt instead for hard shells. If your aliens were very recently not near the top of the food chain, then they’ll likely have their own ways of protecting themselves.

  • Pheromones: Human pheromones are mostly mythical, but a lot of animals do have them. They’re used to attract mates, mark territory, or as a further defense mechanism. Aliens could have them, as well, although they likely wouldn’t have any effect on us.

  • Vestigial organs: Evolution rarely discards that which is no longer needed. If it’s not actively harming the reproductive process, it’ll likely stick around far past its expiration date. That’s what happened with the human appendix, and it’s possible for an alien species, too.

  • Blood: It’s a staple of sci-fi that aliens don’t always have red blood. Sometimes, theirs is even toxic to us. Both cases result from using a different chemical mix than our iron-based hemoglobin. So if you’re looking for a hard-science excuse for green blood, that’s where you’ll want to start.

Conclusion

I could go on for hours, but this post is long enough already. Again, the best way to create aliens is to think about them. Environment affects appearance. Ecology matters. Inside and out, an alien race is beholden to its environment. If it isn’t, then it’s only a matter of time before it becomes so. But we, as worldbuilders, can work backwards: make what we want, then create the world to justify it.

The alien lexicon

Alien languages, we can assume, will function more or less like human ones. They may have different sets of sounds, different grammatical rules, but they all have the same purpose: to communicate. It’s really what they communicate about that’s where worldbuilding meets language-building.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the theories stating that a language influences its speakers’ thoughts to the point where they are unable to understand or even imagine those things the language can’t say. If that were strictly true, loanwords would be all but impossible. No, the brain is more complex than that. We can make new words (or borrow existing ones) for new ideas. That’s kinda the whole point of derivation.

But it’s aliens

Now, when you throw aliens into the mix, things change. Their brains likely won’t work the same way as ours. They’ll still be associative, probably, but the associations they make will be far removed from what we know. So it’s entirely possible that they will have words that literally have no translation into human tongues, and vice versa. Different environments, different evolution, different biology will all play a role in this, so it’s up to you to know how your aliens “work”. Only then can you decide what words they’ll have.

Clearly, any word for a terrestrial species won’t have a direct translation, unless you have some serious backstory going on. (On the other hand, for a fantasy race, such as elves, it’s entirely acceptable and expected that they’ll know the same plants and animals humans do.) But take a step back. Look at the wider world.

Those things not affected by the differing biology of aliens can be relatable. It’s not hard to see that they’d have words for astronomical phenomena (sun, moon, planets, etc., depending on their homeworld’s specifics), though they’ll probably have different cultural connotations. An Earthlike planet, similarly, will have weather—weather much like Earth’s—so there will be an array of weather terms: rain, snow, cloud, wind, and so on. Other things that aren’t tied to the biosphere can also cross this divide: chemical elements, fire, water, mountains, oceans. Essentially anything in the “non-living” sciences works here.

It’s with biology and its subgenres that the real fun begins. Your aliens will have their own names for their own animals, plants, body parts, occupations, and cultural paraphernalia, among other things. Some of these can be related to our own: if an alien calls the part of its body it talks out of a “glorb”, it’s a safe bet you can translate that as “mouth”. Others…not so much. Imagine, for instance, an alien race capable of seeing into the infrared. Those guys will have a whole host of color words that make no sense to us at all. A species of eight-legged bug people might have special names for those extra limbs, but we’d refer to them all as “legs”. If they’re lucky, we might divide them into “forelegs” and “hindlegs”, but we’re not going to recognize the nuances.

Really, designing an alien conlang’s lexicon is more an exercise in defining its culture than anything. In that regard, yes, language influences thought. But from a designer’s perspective, let’s look at it the other way around. How do your aliens think? What makes them special, compared to the humans of Earth? Let those questions, among others, be your guide. Find the ways aliens differ, because that’s where their lexicon will be, well, alien.

First contact

It is easy to go too far here, however. Much of the language will be somewhat compatible with a terrestrial tongue. It may not be exact, but it won’t be too much worse than translating between two wildly different natural languages. Our six thousand get up to some pretty crazy stuff already, especially in the vocabulary department. Even if we don’t have a perfect translation, we’ll figure something out.

If you’re making an alien conlang for a story, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll have some kind of “first contact” situation. There, if the aliens are at all like us, they’ll know to keep things simple. Diplomatically speaking, it’s best to adjust your level of speech to that of your listener, particularly when the wrong word could spark an interstellar war or something of that sort. So you don’t have to go overboard on the “alien words for alien things” bit. Sprinkle in a few words here and there to make them feel otherworldly—names for weapons or lesser alien species are a good choice for this—and call it a day. Everything else will have a reasonable interpretation in English or your natural language of choice.

However you go about it, the lexicon is a great place to really drive home the otherness of an alien race. Most readers and viewers won’t bother figuring out the finer points of grammar or making sense of the strange sounds emanating from alien mouths. The words, by contrast, are right there. They’re front and center, most notably when an alien speaker drops one into casual conversation, like they do in every sci-fi movie or TV show ever. In some cases, that might be your only opportunity to flesh out a culture or world that wouldn’t otherwise get screen time, so take advantage of it.

Free short story: “Miracles”

I’ve told a lot about the writing I do. Now it’s time to show it. “Miracles” is a little story I wrote in March 2015, and I’m posting it here as a free example of my work. Although it’s a little over 11,000 words long, I still consider it a short story.

Set in the 1730s, it’s a brief tale of a young brother and sister, Thomas and Mira, and their flight from England to the American Colonies. Crossing the Atlantic is treacherous, especially for a pair of twelve-year-old orphans, but they have to go. They can’t stay home, but can they outrun the dark secret they share?

Read it now

Continue reading Free short story: “Miracles”

Procedural midpoint displacement

So I’ve been talking in the abstract about procedural generation. Now, let’s get to something solid. In this post, we’ll look at one of the most basic methods of “terrain” generation out there. (I use the scare quotes here for a very good reason, as you’ll soon see.) The technique is called midpoint displacement, and it’s a fairly simple method that can give sensible results…if you know how to use it.

The easiest way to demonstrate the algorithm is in two dimensions. That’s for a couple of reasons. First, lines are easier to visualize than planes in a medium like this. Two, heightmaps take longer to construct, and they’re harder to tweak. So instead of making actual terrain (i.e., an area of simulated land), we’ll make a line-art representation. Think of it as a cross section if you like, or the beginnings of a 2D scroller’s background.

Onto the algorithm itself. You start with a blank surface (a straight, horizontal line, in our case). Take the midpoint of that surface and move it up or down by a small, random amount. Now you’ll have two lines meeting at an angle. That might not look very terrain-like, but, at this stage, it’s not supposed to. The trick with midpoint displacement is that it’s recursive. For each of these line segments, do the same thing as before: move the midpoint by a random amount. Keep going as long as you want, either until you’re bumping up against resolution limits or you reach some predefined level of detail.

The end result is an increasingly “fractalized” line that begins to look less artificial and more like something that could come from natural processes of erosion and the like. The more subdivisions you do, the smoother the finished product will look, like so:

midpoint-displace

The above image shows midpoint displacement, with an increasing number of subdivisions. At the top, we have 1, going up to 10 at the bottom. (Note that these are separately generated images.) By the bottom, we’re starting to see something that doesn’t look too bad. You can go farther in your own code; I used Inkscape just for illustration, and 10 is the highest setting it has.

Using your imagination, you might be able to see how this could be interpreted as terrain. It’s a very rugged terrain, though, and that comes from the other tweakable parameter. Remember how I told you, at each step, to move the midpoint a little in either direction? Well, how far you move it determines how rough the generated terrain becomes. This is the smoothness factor.

In general, midpoint displacement works best if you decrease the range of movement at each subdivision. Otherwise, you get wild swings that don’t look at all natural. The “default” assumption is that each step has half the range as the one before it, but changing the smoothness affects this; smoother generation requires smaller variation.

Interactive tools to visualize midpoint displacement aren’t hard to find, and code samples are almost as easy, so we’ll leave off here for now. Later, we’ll look at expanding this idea to a three-dimensional world, where we can truly see the effect of terrain generation.

Social Liberty: Definitions

First, let us call the fundametnal properties of good government the Principles. These are so central to the idea of Social Liberty that they literally cannot be violated within its framework. A Principle is inviolate by definition, for changing it would change the nature of the space. Principles are thus axiomatic; the six I have chosen define the very concept of Social Liberty.

Second, a Right is a property taken to be inherent to the system. It cannot be abridged, violated, or removed except by another Right or as punishment. Rights in Social Liberty include many of those taken to be inalienable and self-evident, such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and the right to a trial. A new right can be created, as described by the Principle of Evolution, in a manner dependent upon the system of government.

Third, a Law may be defined as a requirement that must be followed by the citizens of a state. Laws may not be written to directly infringe Rights, but they may define the boundaries of those Rights, and violation of a Law may cause Rights to be lost temporarily. In addition, Laws may be used to clarify cases where two different Rights are in conflict. For example, a Law cannot revoke a Right of Free Speech, but it is allowed to spell out those instances where that Right is overruled by a Right of Privacy.

Fourth, a Responsibility is a duty impressed upon citizens as part of the social contract they form with their government. Laws may bring about Responsibilities, but these may not permanently deprive a citizen of a Right. Responsibilities may also arise logically from Principles; these Responsibilities may violate Laws and limit Rights.

Fifth, a Privilege is subordinate to a Law. It is a lesser right created by the interaction of Laws and Rights, and it may be removed by either. New Rights are rare, but new Privileges may be invented more rapidly, under the Principle of Evolution.

Finally, let us define a Definition as a clarification of the meaning of a word as it is used in the text of a Right, Responsibility, Law, or Privilege.

The Doctrine of Social Liberty is made up of these Principles, Rights, Responsibilities, Laws, and Definitions. They are written in plain language, because understanding the principles of one’s state is necessary for a citizen. Each is given a name for easier reference, as in this example:

Right of Arms — All persons are permitted to own and bear personal arms intended for their own defense.

In later Laws or other text, this can be referred to simply as “the Right of Arms”. For example:

Law of Disallowed Weapons — Any weapon capable of killing multiple people with a single shot, or requiring the operation of more than one person, shall not be considered a personal arm under the Right of Arms.

With these definitions, we are able to construct the structure necessary to create a nation-state that fulfills the goals of Social Liberty.